Betrayed by your smartphone: Cory Doctorow on the future of internet censorship

When in May the European Court of Justice issued the ruling that has become known as “the right to be forgotten”, allowing individuals to request their removal from search results, it startled many in the tech industry. The decision jarred with their respect for freedom of speech, and commentators pointed out that Google would have to develop an infrastructure for assessing and removing search results. This seemed a very big ask.

Yet Google already has an effective system of self-censorship. It exists to comply with takedown notices issued under copyright legislation, when rights holders want links to piracy sites removed from their search results. One of the main arguments the sci-fi novelist and activist Cory Doctorow makes in his new book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, is that the infrastructure for copyright enforcement is the same as that for censorship.

“Information wants to be free” is a rallying cry for many of those who fight against legal restrictions on the internet. The phrase was coined by the tech writer Stewart Brand in 1984 and referred to the way the web reduces many of the costs of producing and disseminating data to near zero. “Free” in this phrase has also come to mean “freedom”, because the internet makes it easy to avoid censorship.

Doctorow is challenging both interpretations – not because he doesn’t agree with them but because he thinks a crucial premise has been lost. “Information doesn’t want to be free,” he writes, “people want to be free.”

The first two-thirds of the book discusses ways in which artists are penalised by the internet’s present regulatory system. He criticises digital rights management (DRM) technology, which limits the platforms digital files can play on; not only does it mean we don’t “own” the files we pay for, but when a company that supports a file goes bust, the culture locked up in their DRM can be lost for ever. Doctorow describes this as “a library burning in slow motion”.

Many companies such as Apple sell devices that block you from downloading non-approved apps. “That is sold to creators as an anti-piracy measure,” Doctorow tells me when we speak on the phone. “But the most practical application has been to allow Apple to exert market power that it would never have had in any other world.”

This links to the final third of the book, which explores how systems for protecting copyrighted material can also be used for censorship.

Last month the security firm ESD America found dozens of “fake” mobile-phone towers across the US which were extracting data from users who unknowingly connected to them. Similar towers have been used at protests by police forces around the world to monitor activists. Doctorow argues that a government (he cites Ukraine as an example) could react to a protest by cross-referencing that data with information gleaned from domestic internet connections, because anti-digital piracy legislation often mandates “taps” on home web connections. Then it’s a simple job to establish protesters’ names and addresses. If they have a new smart thermostat, which is connected to the web, the state could even extract individual protesters’ thermostat ID. “Then they just cut off everybody’s heat that night,” he says. “Problem solved, done in one.”

Doctorow’s novels are often set in a technologically enabled dystopia. Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a blend of mundane copyright policy recommendations and warnings about what will happen if our societies do not change course. “This,” he says, “is about whether our devices will betray us.”

The internationally celebrated theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, has died at his home in Cambridge at the age of 76.

In a statement about their father’s death, his children Lucy, Robert and Tim acknowledged how his study of the stars inspired millions around the world: “He once said, ‘It wouldn’t be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.' We will miss him forever.”

The news broke on the same night that the UK awaited the Russian government’s response to the poisoning of a former spy on British soil – and was a timely reminder of what connects us across borders. “All we need to do is make sure we keep talking,” Hawking once advised humanity (words that the band Pink Floyd would later re-purpose).

Born in 1942, on the 300th anniversary of the death of Galileo, his mother fled London’s war-time bombs for the safety of the countryside, and the young scientist would grow up in a house in St Albans with a basement full of bees and a greenhouse full of fireworks.

A passion for mathematics soon led him to a PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge. But the growing power of his mind was coming into conflict with the deteriorating state of his health, and he was diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease called ALS. He was just 21 years old.

His symptoms would later require the use of a wheelchair and a voice-synthesiser, yet the experience spurred on his work. “Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing,” he wrote in his memoir. “I suddenly realised that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I was reaprieved.”

Hawking’s research in the field of black holes and relativity, together with his fellow cosmologist Roger Penrose, earned him vast international acclaim and prestige; most famously in proving that black holes were not vacuums or “eternal prisons”. Then in 1988 he published a book, A Brief History of Time, which set records all of its own. Published in 40 languages, the bestseller explained complex ideas about how the universe started and how it might end to a mass audience.

He always remained anxious about about what might lie ahead for humanity, however, issuing numerous warnings about the giant balls of cosmic fire or take-overs by artificial-intelligence that could lie in wait.

But it was perhaps this mix of horizon-expanding curiosity and deep personal care that turned his search for a theory of everything into a story for everyone. At a time when the cold war’s space race was finally approaching an end, Hawking’s work inspired a whole generation to think differently about the stars and our place within them.

“No one created the universe and no one directs our fate,” he once wrote. “This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe—and for that I am extremely grateful.”

India Bourke is an environment writer and editorial assistant at the New Statesman.